Chaney

Title: Chaney (we live in the fragments)

Year: 2014-present

Medium: Painting

Materials: oil paintings on hardboard

Statement: Chaney is colloquialism, a hybrid word combining "china" and "money". It describes shards found in the dirt on many properties and locations throughout the Virgin Islands that often resurface after a hard rainfall. Originally from pieces of colonial fine china imported both in display of and as a result of the wealth of the plantation economy, "chaney" serves as a reminder of both the colonial past and the fragmented present of Caribbean societies. These shards tell the visual stories of power and projection and how cultures reimagine themselves in this vast transAtlantic narrative.

Exhibited: Christiansted National Historic Site, Peachcan Gallery

Chaney (plate series)

Title: Chaney

Year: 2017

Medium: Porcelain plates produced by the Royal Copenhagen

Materials: 12 porcelain plates

Statement: Chaney is colloquialism, a hybrid word combining "china" and "money". It describes shards found in the dirt on many properties and locations throughout the Virgin Islands that often resurface after a hard rainfall. Originally from pieces of colonial fine china imported both in display of and as a result of the wealth of the plantation economy, "chaney" serves as a reminder of both the colonial past and the fragmented present of Caribbean societies. These shards tell the visual stories of power and projection and how cultures reimagine themselves in this vast transAtlantic narrative. This series was produced in collaboration with the Royal Copenhagen (formerly the Royal Porcelain Factory), a luxury brand of porcelain products with an over 200 year history.

Exhibited: Christiansborg Palace

Cuts and Burns

Title: Cuts and Burns

Year: 2016-present

Medium: Drawing/ Installation

Materials: cuts and burns on paper and vellum

Statement: The "Cuts and Burns" series developed from an interest in the historic fretwork designs in Frederiksted whose proliferation is a direct result of the town being largely burnt down after the 1878 Labor Revolt (or Fireburn) and then being rebuilt during the Victorian era when these designs were popular. This work seeks to to develop a vocabulary that models the language of resistance during this colonial era. Two of the most common forms of rebellious activity were cutting, using the same machete you were forced to labor with as a weapon; and burning, burning down the plantations and other structures. The work also references the ritualistic aspect of resistance as well as the psychological expression of trauma.

Exhibited: Top Hat Gallery, Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts

Cuts and Burns (Ledger Series_002), La Vaughn Belle 2017

Photo Credit: I DO ART Agency

Errata

Title: “Errata”

Year: 2017

Medium: Installation of two texts: the book “Stedet Fortæller om Dansk Vestindien” and email correspondence between the author and the artist

This work is a form of counter-archive based on juxtaposing two texts: the book “Stedet Fortæller om Dansk Vestindien” by Ulla Lunn in which includes a description of the artist and her work renovating buildings in the town of Christiansted and the email correspondence that occurs between the artist and the author upon the discovery that there is an error in the book.

Exhibited: meter, Copenhagen

Errata, La Vaughn Belle, 2017

Photo Credit: I DO ART Agency

Errata, La Vaughn Belle, 2017

Photo Credit: I DO ART Agency

On The Service To The Kingdom

Title: On The Service To The Kingdom

Year: 2017

Medium: Painting/Installation

Materials: Acrylic painting on 45 paper plates

Statement: "On The Service To A Kingdom" is based on an investigation of the dessert service series of plates commissioned by King Frederik 6 of Denmark to represent his expansive Kingdom. This extravagant gesture was made to show off his wealth. There is only one plate, #75, of the 81 that depicts the colonies in the Caribbean from which much of this wealth was gained. The series also references the sugar industry as the taste for sugar was in high demand in Europe at the time and would have represented also the most expensive part of the meal. The image depicted however is a fictitious one, a copy of a copy. The artists commissioned in 1834 to do the series never visited the Danish West Indies, but instead create a composite of other paintings while adding in the Caribbean signifiers of the coconut trees, the sugar mill and the aloe plant. The piece explores the ideas of colonial image-making and consumption and the resulting processes of fragmentation of identity.

Exhibited: GL Holtegaard

On The Service To The Kingdom

Constructed Manumissions

Title: Constructed Manumissions

Year: 2017

Medium: Installation

Materials: handmade wooden houses

“Constructed Manumissions” uses the ornate building embellishments made popular in the town of Frederiksted during its reconstruction after the “Fireburn”, the labor revolt in 1878. The design is also based on the homes of the working class, in particular the “Free Colored” community of Christiansted, previously named “Neger Gotter”. This community of formerly enslaved Africans had various ways that they negotiated their freedoms in the colonial era, domestic space was but one of them.

The houses are made without frames or glue but are held together with small metal pins and their own weight, making them mobile, able to be taken apart, imitating the mobility that was historically necessary at times.

Exhibited:

meter, Copenhagen

"Constructed Manumissions", La Vaughn Belle, 2017

Photo Credit: I DO ART Agency

Detail: "Constructed Manumissions", La Vaughn Belle, 2017

Photo Credit: I DO ART Agency

Detail: "Constructed Manumissions"

Photo Credit: I DO ART Agency

Hideaway

Title: Hideaway

Year: 2005

Medium: book

Materials: 10-page handmade book of cut-outs

Statement: This project was inspired by the cut-outs made by the famous Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. Similar to the Danish narrative and collective memory about their colonial history, the book presents “Hideaway” as a fairytale, part fiction- part reality. The book's images and text are taken from the real-estate websites and magazines popular in the Virgin Islands that "sell" the islands as a fairy tale, an adventure, an escape, a hideaway.

Wall Rubbings

Title: Wall Rubbings (record of the work of others)

Year: 2017

Medium: Drawing/ Installation

Materials: wax rubbings on aquaba paper

The foundations of many of the buildings in the former Danish West Indies are made from the coral cut from the ocean by the enslaved Africans. Normally these foundations are plastered and covered, allowing for their labor to be invisible.

Exhibited: meter, Copenhagen

Wall Rubbings (record of the work of others), La Vaughn Belle, 2017

Photo Credit: I DO ART Agency

Detail: Wall Rubbings, La Vaughn Belle, 2017

Photo Credit: I DO ART Agency

Detail: "Wall Rubbings (record of the work of others), La Vaughn Belle, 2017

Photo Credit: I DO ART Agency

Photomontage Series

Statement: These photomontages are a series that explores images from the Danish archives of the Danish West Indies and juxtaposes them with images from the personal archives and albums of the artist. They included images of the artist as an infant in the Virgin Islands and young child in Wisconsin while her father went to seminary school. There is an image of her mother carrying her youngest brother and an image of her father who was a Moravian and later an Anglican priest. The narratives embedded in the images become collapsed, converted, contested and re-imagined in the simple gesture of juxtaposition and/or adding captions to the images. Most of the captions are directly quoted from the archives and original sources.

Exhibited: Top Hat Gallery

Somebody's Been Sitting In My Chair, Somebody's Been Sleeping in My Bed

Title: Somebody's Been Sitting In My Chair, Somebody's Been Sleeping in My Bed

Year: 2011

Medium: Performance, Video

Materials: Video

Statement: This video is a reenactment of the fairy tale “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” in a plantation “Great House”. As the artist moves within the space there is a similar questioning of trespassing in a “forbidden” space.

Collectible

Title: Collectible

Year: 2008

Medium: Drawing

Materials: nine drawing on paper plates, printed log with the descriptions of the plates as found in the historical archives

Statement: Collectible is a series of drawings on paper plates that reproduce a series of collectible plates produced by the Royal Copenhagen luxury china brand in the early 1900's. These plates all reference the Virgin Islands (formerly the Danish West Indies) and allude to the nature of the colonial relationship.

Exhibited: Overgarden Institute of Art, Maufe Gallery

The Planter's Chair

Title: Planter’s Chair

Year: 2011

Medium: Performance

Dimensions:

Materials: planter’s chair, participants, polaroid camera

Statement: The planter’s chair is a unique piece of furniture whose design is based on the function and power of the planter in the colonial plantation system. The long arms of the chair double as both an arm and foot rest as it was typical that a servant would assist in the removal of the planter’s boots as he propped up his feet. Individuals were asked to pose for a Polaroid photograph while sitting in the planter’s chair allowing each participant to reimagine themselves into this colonial narrative.

Exhibited: Whim Plantation Museum

Trading Post

Title: Trading Post (articulated hierarchies and visible displacements)Year: 2015Medium: SculptureDimensions: 36"x18"x18"Materials: Reclaimed coral stone cut by enslaved Africans, encased in plexiglassStatement: During the construction of the Danish colony on St. Croix enslaved Africans were sent into the ocean to cut coral to be used in the foundations for the buildings to be constructed. Much of these foundations are plastered and invisible except in buildings that are in ruin. Reclaiming the stones from ruins and abandoned structures Trading Post mediates the space, object and history, showcasing the labor of the often forgotten enslaved population and laboring class and inverting the hierarchy of the visible narrative. Exhibited: artist studio

Fatalism and Fairy Tales and the Predictable Magic of Everything

Title: Fatalism, Fairy Tales and the Predictable Magic of Everything

Year: 2016

Medium: Photographic Montage

Materials: Photographic Print

Statement: “Fatalism and Fairy Tales and the Predictable Magic of Everything” is a photo-montage that uses two images: one, of a story written by the artist’s brother as a young child and saved by their mother; and two, of the same brother as a teenager captured in the middle of the act of dunking a basketball. The work questions which of these images in the fairy-tale, the act of the boy attempting to fly, or the story of the boy with the fatalistic future, surprisingly imagined by a young boy himself. The piece re-creates a tension between the hope and hopeless often experienced in the growing up of black boyhood.

Exhibited: Top Hat Gallery

A Countess, a Negress, a Dog and a Baby

Title: A Countess, a Negress, a Dog and a Baby

Year: 2011

Medium: Installation

Materials: two paintings: Danish Countess and Neky with Baby

Statement: Two juxtaposed portraits painted from roughly the same era, one located at Whim Plantation Museum depicting a Danish countess holding her puppy, the other a replica, originally from the Danish National Museum of Cultural History, depicting a Danish West Indian woman holding a Danish infant. The work both inverts and exposes the hierarchy in the Danish colonial system, interrogating the tropes of wealth and privilege.

Exhibited: Whim Plantation Museum

The First and The Last

Title: The First and The Last

Year: 2011

Medium: Video

Materials: video

Statement: This video is comprised of images from the castle of the Danish king who began the colonies in the Caribbean and the final resting place of the last Danish governor of the colonies under enslavement. The work contrasts the quiet beauty of these spaces with text that interrogates its in the style of a folktale its equally violent history.

Exhibited: Salt Gallery, St. Croix

La Pelota Roja

Title: La Pelota Roja

Year: 2002

Medium: Performance

Materials: tape recording of collective and anonymous story

Statement: This piece is a version of “the exquisite corpse” in which a story is collected by asking random people in Havana to participate in the construction of this story. Each person was asked to listen to the piece and then add to it. The piece explores how metaphor and multi-layered narratives operate as tools of survival and resistance in a society that has limited freedom of expression.

Exhibited: Center of Visual Arts, Havana, Cuba

Storm (and other violent disturbances of the pinturesco)

Title: Storm (and other violent interruptions of the pintoresco)

Year: 2016

Medium: Drawing

Materials: charcoal drawings on paper

Statement: This series of charcoal drawings on paper puts in direct contrast the sublime palm tree images with those of the chaos of the storm creating a tension between fragility and resistance.

Exhibited: Yacht Haven Grande

Branding

Title: Branding

Year: 2006

Medium: Installation

Materials: reprinted labels on various household products

Statement: This artist exchanges the images used on various products to sell their brand and replaces it with her image.

Exhibited: Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, St. Croix

Los Diaros de Porcelana

Title: Los Diaros de Porcelana

Year: 2002

Medium: Video

Materials: video

Statement: Translated into english as “The Porcelain Diaries, this video examines the narratives inherent in the figurines that often populate Caribbean homes. Filmed in Havana among five houses, the video creates spontaneous narratives using stop-motion animation.

Coronation

Title: Coronation

Year: 2011

Medium: Sculpture/ Installation

Materials: hand carved forks, knives and spoons

Statement: “Coronation” takes the image of a Danish coin made in honor of the three islands that consisted of the Danish West Indies and uses the mythology that developed around the coin to create a series of cutlery that emulates those of great wealth. The three women on the coin had been re-interpreted to represent the three “Queens of the Fireburn”, a major mostly female led labor revolt in 1878.

Exhibited: Walsh Metal Works, Whim Plantation Museum, St. Croix

La Telenovela

Title: La Telenovela

Year: 2004

Medium: Video

Materials: video

Statement: Telenovela, “soap opera”, is a piece that combines the audio of the popular government sponsored Cuban melodrama with eight different homes as the members and neighbors are watching simultaneously. Creating a mirroring effect the audience also becomes a part of the “melodrama”.

Home Theater

Title: Home Theater

Year: 2005

Medium: video

Materials: 10 tv monitors with 10 dvd players and pedestals of various heights

Statement: Home Theater is a video installation of ten homes filmed from such angles that when when put together feel like a singular space. `the piece comments on the virtual reality and the domestic space.

Exhibited: Centro de Wilfredo Lam, Cuba

Moving Pictures

Title: Moving Pictures

Year: 2009

Medium: video

Materials: video

Statement: This project is an investigation on the Hollywood films that have been filmed in the Virgin Islands which typically use the islands as a backdrop, ignoring the people and culture. Audio and visuals from movies such as "Weekend at Bernies II", “Shawshank Redemption”, “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and "Trading Places" are deconstructed and then reconstructed to create new narratives.